US President Donald Trump on Tuesday toured a remote migrant detention centre in the Florida Everglades dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” as his Republican allies advanced a sweeping spending bill that could ramp up deportations.
The facility sits some 60km (37 miles) from Miami in a vast subtropical wetland teeming with alligators, crocodiles and pythons, fearsome imagery the White House has leveraged to show its determination to purge migrants it says were wrongly allowed to stay in the country under former US president Joe Biden’s administration.
Trump raved about the facility’s quick construction as he scanned rows of dozens of empty bunk beds enclosed in cages and warned about the threatening conditions surrounding the facility.
“I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking any time soon,” Trump said at a roundtable event after his tour.
“We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is really deportation.”
The complex in southern Florida at the Dade Collier Training and Transition Airport is estimated to cost US$450 million annually and could house some 5,000 people, officials estimate.
